Benjamin Britten

Britten, Benjamin, Baron Britten of Aldeburgh - 1913–76, English composer. Britten is considered the most significant British composer since Purcell. As a youth he composed instrumental works, displaying technical brilliance and colorful orchestration. One example, The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1946), written for a film, is based on a theme by Purcell. His most characteristic expression is achieved in vocal music. His many song cycles and choral works include A Boy Was Born (1933) and A Ceremony of Carols (1942). Britten's great War Requiem (1962), based on the bitter war poems of Wilfred Owen, was sung at the dedication in England of the reconstructed Coventry Cathedral, destroyed during World War II. In his operas, which include Paul Bunyan (1941), Peter Grimes (1945), The Rape of Lucretia (1946), The Turn of the Screw (1954), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960), and Death in Venice (1973), he displayed a sensitivity to text and a fondness for variation technique, dynamic dissonance, and the use of ground basses. In 1976 Queen Elizabeth II named him a life peer.

See biographies by I. Holst (2d ed. 1970), E. W. White (new ed. 1970), and H. Carpenter (1992); study by P. Evans (1979).

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